[COFF] Other OSes?

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 11:24 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 07/08/2018 07:56 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> > [snip]

> At least for me, the huge difference that made a difference to how I
> > would use a computer primarily had to do with speed that could be sent
> > from a computer.  So even when using a glass tty, if there was 300 or
> > 1200 bps modem between me and the computer, I would be much more likely
> > to use editor scripts --- and certainly, I'd be much more likely to use
> > a line
> [snip]
>
> Will you please elaborate on what you mean by "editor scripts"?  That's
> a term that I'm not familiar with.  —  I didn't see an answer to this
> question, so I'm asking again.
>

Back in the days of line editors, which read their commands from the
standard input and were relatively simple programs as far as their user
interface was concerned, you could put a set of editor commands into a file
and run it sort of like a shell script. This way, you could run the same
sequence of commands against (potentially) many files. Think something like:

$ cat >scr.ed
g/unix/s/unix/Unix/g
w
q
^D
$ for f in *.ms; do ed $f << scr.ed; done; unset f
...

Back in the days of teletypes, line editors were of course the only things
we had. When we moved to glass TTYs with cursor addressing we got richer
user interfaces, but with those came more complex input handling (often
reading directly from the terminal in "raw" mode), which meant that
scripting the editor was harder, as you usually couldn't just redirect a
file into its stdin.

        - Dan C.
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